Blue, fringed with the shawl of foam, no whites in the corners. She fixed her gaze on Jed. She advanced as slowly as a zombie. The surrounding crowd spread out away from him and her.
“You,” she said, pointing a finger at him. Her voice was deep, thick and husky.
Jed’s keloid tingled. It had risen from a cut he’d gotten when he was riding his bike to work a year ago. The ugly scar grew from the sea of his black skin. It was an island of deformity. For the past few months, he’d been able to ignore it. Now, it telegraphed every uncomfortable feeling he had. It was sensitive in the way arthritic bones were. Fear was the emotion that he felt. This woman was clearly deranged, and doubtlessly held some power over the gathered crowd. He felt completely the interloper, the American Black who might as well have been white. The eyeshaped portals to the sea captured his reflection. They mesmerized.
Jed broke eye contact, before he sank into them. He saw the priest at the periphery, where the white sand turned brown. He caught its eye: Help. The priest shrugged. He was beyond its power. He was in her hands now.
She repeated, “You,” and her overwhelming smell hit him. She stepped right up to him, and got in his face. He felt small, even though he towered over her. She could crush him, if she wanted to. She did not. “You, you are mine.”
Her voice was deep and male. A basso profoundo that creaked and cracked like hurricane-warped wood. She stank, and Jed thought of fishscales, wavering fronds, fishshit and oil. She smelled like leviathan whales, and the strange fish that dwell at the bottom of the ocean that have bioluminescence. “Mine…”
The sun at the bottom of the sea glowed. Dark blue into sapphire water.
All over the island, there were images of the patron saint. In churches, towel, t-shirt and grottoes. The fey youth pierced by arrows. Sebastian lent his name to hotels and clubs on the island. The Arrow Bed and Breakfast. Saint’s Peak. The island’s lone gay club was The Catamite. Those languorous eyes with luscious lashes, the slender youthful body, and the tortured pose were everywhere. You couldn’t avoid them. Everywhere you turned, the murdered homosexual saint appeared, like Mary would in sandwiches and cloud formations.
The possessed woman’s eyes pierced him with arrows tipped with toxins. The jolt of the eel and the sting of the ray were in that gaze.
“Mine…”
Echoes in underwater grottoes.
She took his hand, and Jed rose. He followed, wanting to hear the echoes. She pulled him to the water’s edge, then into the water itself. They walked out into the water, which was as warm as mother’s milk, knee high, then waist high. On the shore, the gathering had reformed their half-O shape. The woman, who was something more than a woman, led him on. Jed felt the silky carpet of the ocean floor. A smooth pebble or stone would graze his feet. Waves crested and they went underneath them for thrillingly brief seconds. He saw faces in algae, and fish made of sunlight. Before long, even that didn’t matter. He floated, massaged by water streams. They stopped at some point, and just bobbed like buoys.
A current of cold water broke the spell, or whatever it was. The safety of the woman’s grip ended. Jed felt the cold fingers of the current run through his legs. The cold bit him. They were frozen, and he began shivering immediately.
“What the hell…”
His guide was shocked awake with him. The sea spilled out of her eyes, into the surrounding water. She closed her eyes, and abruptly snapped awake, with prosaic brown eyes and panic in them. She shrieked.
“Calm down,” Jed told her, through his chattering teeth. “We’ll make it back to the shore together.” There would be time later to figure out what had happened. The people on the shore were not quite dots. And the cold current wasn’t that strong. He felt its insistent touch, as if he were being tickled by feathers of ice. His companion, completely freaked out by now, began to babble in her patios. She battled the waves, and began to swim, clumsily, toward the shore. Jed began to follow suit, and found that he couldn’t feel his limbs. A lesson on hypothermia came back to him as he tried to control his cryogenic body. He felt the blood in his veins had turned to liquid nitrogen.
He watched as the woman made her slow progress to the shore, to the group of people who waited for her and loved her. He was frozen in the sea, a sacrifice to some unknown god. Jed strained his muscles, felt nothing. His body was no longer his own. Soon, he’d go into shock, and the gravity of the sea would pull him under. Surely, the people on the shore would realize what had happened to him, and would go for help? Unless this was his punishment for witnessing their secret service. Jed felt the stirrings of rage. Death was too big a penalty for seeing what was conducted in public. Those stupid savages… But, he remembered that they were kind, and had let him join in. He remembered clapping, and singing along with them. Of course, they would go for help, as soon as they realized what had happened to him. It would be too late to save him, though.
Almost as an afterthought, Jed called out. What started out as “help” turning in a long, anguished howl that was carried away by the wind, the sea, and various ambient noises. He tired his voice out. He drifted away, carried by a riptide. Rising hillocks of sapphire and emerald separated him from the shore.
“You are mine,” the woman had said with the sea’s voice. She was right; he was now of the water. Soon, he would be one with salt, and fish. Images and emotions of his past life flashed before his eyes in random and senseless order. Candy from a favorite aunt. Watching Prague emerge from the window of a train. The first time he had sex. He was giving all his memories—all of his essence—to the water. The sea had a name. Olokun.
Something within him, something dark and instinctual, reacted to the bubble of thought. The name meant something. Just thinking it made him less cold. Of course, he was going mad. But what harm to say the name aloud?
He managed “Olokun” as he sunk beneath a surge of saltwater. His lungs filled, then he popped back up like a buoy, and said the name again. His fingers tingled, as did the balls of his feet. He could feel his body again. He did not dare to hope what a third pronunciation might bring. Would he be free of the riptide? It was foolish, magical thinking, like the believers. And yet, Jed had never really been a committed agnostic. The supernatural was a nice idea; logic was overrated, as far as he was concerned. He said “Olokun” a third and final time.
The sea froze. Everything froze. No waves. No birds. No current. No sound. Jed might have been alone in the world. He saw each molecule of water. Beneath the water he saw a jellyfish, a translucent silver balloon with pastel organs, caught in the knot of time, as if trapped in blue Lucite. A spot of golden sunlight stained the surface of the sea. He could see the striations of wrinkles. The golden spot was an island of light on the face of the sea. The whole world held its breath. The arrow was knocked. Who did the world wait for?
Motion. It happened all it once. The crest of a wave, the shiver of jellyfish, a gulp of water in his lungs. The current came back, stronger than before, and it tugged him underneath the waves. He could no longer fight it. The sea swallowed him, pulled him down into the deep. Bubbles of air escaped him, little silver jellyfish heading for the surface that he would never see again. Cold water rushed to fill his lungs and nostrils, to crush them. He let out a gasp, to hurry the business of drowning. No bubble of air escaped.
Jed blinked. He took another breath, and found that his lungs were satisfied. The invisible current that he was trapped within was not cold, either. It was a warm as the zephyrs that played across St. Sebastian. He blinked, and found that he could breathe, even as the curtain-like drapes of sunlight slowly receded.
I am dead. Some chemical had dumped into his brain, and filled it with peaceful hallucinations to lead him to death, that was the only reasonable explanation. I might as well enjoy this elevator ride to Death.
He settled into the unseen cushion that bore him down in the yawning depths. The current led him through a shoal of grouper, with bright yellow fins and spotted like giraffes. They
wove and danced around him, aquatic sunlight given form. Other, finer fish, in colors of green and electric blue appeared now and then, and ignored him. Jed flew past a coral bed, pink and treacherous. A shark lunged at him, but something—the current?—kept it at bay.
Down and down and down he went. A light disappeared; he found he could still see perfectly, as if he had dark-adapted eyes. He saw blue in the darkest tones, beyond the human spectrum. He made up names for the colors that he saw: Strata Blue. Stygian Cerulean. Chthonian Indigo. He sped by valleys and chasms where who knew what lived. Giant squid, whales and other leviathans of the deep hid in the topography.
Just as Jed relaxed in the current, he noticed that the speed of his travel slowed the deeper he went. He looked behind him, since he was “seated” backwards, to see what new sights were ahead.
At first, he thought it was a cliff, a misshapen underwater mountain. Then he saw the “mountain” had familiar shapes in it. Car parts, pipes, coral, and shells, a mountain of junk. Engines and abandoned fans nested among coral reefs and various skeletons of long dead sea creatures. At various intervals were circular openings to the mountain; some of these were filled with the portal windows of ships. Fish darted out of the open ones, vanishing into the hollow center of the mountain, like tourists into a cathedral. With that thought, it occurred to him that this structure was, in fact, some kind of building. It was too arranged for it not to be. The current nudged him further on, to the bottom of the building of shells and sea wrecks. He stopped and hovered in the chthonian indigo, in front of a large door. It yawned. Its frame was formed by the ribs of some huge whale, and fringed with hundreds, thousands of glimmering coins—the long lost treasure of pirates. Irregular circles of gold, the embossing faded and verdigrised. Jed waited. The whole ocean floor waited.
For what?
For whom?
The answer was obvious. It vibrated in his heart, his head, and his soul. The excitement was inseparable from the fear. It thrummed through him, like electricity. He felt himself harden with anticipation.
In the hollow of dark contained by the steepled door, Jed saw movement—filmy, diaphanous swirls of movement. Cobalt dark changed to electric blue as the form resolved itself. The first thing Jed saw was the eyes. They burned, lambent and green like cat’s eyes. But there was no oval slit to interrupt the green. It became clear that these glowing almond-shapes were eyes, when strange undersea light described a face. The skin was like lava turned to fabric. The high cheekbones and high forehead, the wide nose, the whole architecture of the face had some marvelous black stretched across it, hard as rock, and as soft as silk. Nappy, knotted hair adhered to the top of the head—black coral. As the figure emerged from the door, Jed saw the giant man’s magnificent torso. Lava skin, firm pectorals, and the large dinner plate sized nipples, plummy in color. His waist tapered downward. Jed throbbed in anticipation—both his keloid and his groin. His eyes traveled down the molten skin, where surely perfectly shaped, large genitalia were.
Below the giant’s waist was a finely woven garment of blue scales that shimmered with glints of green and gold. It was a skirt of peacock feathers. Jed looked for the garment’s end, to see legs ropy and thick with muscle. He found that the garment continued, covering his feet, and ended with a filmy, flowing fin. Jed laughed—he could imagine the Icelandic singer Björk wearing such an outfit. Then realization struck with the force of a tidal wave. The giant wasn’t wearing a skirt. That was his tail. He was Olokun, the one who’d dragged him a thousand miles beneath the sea. The one who he’d been sacrificed to… The betrayal of the people on the beach was withering. It overwhelmed the wonder of the merman and the palace of shells and junk. The creature (or god) must have perceived Jed’s final recognition, for a slight smirk played at the corner of his (His?) lips of plum. Pupilless eyes captured Jed, a fly caught in absinthe. The eyes raked him, burned away his clothes, until his stood naked before the god. He was so weak; Olokun’s presence was Kryptonite to him. Jed worried he would be soon devoured. What would it be like, to be crushed by the giant pearls of his teeth? His negritude nourishing the substance of myth. The useless bits, the gristle of Europe and the West, would be shat out, spread across the sea.
“Please,” said Jed. Or he thought it. This far down, bubbles flattened and elongated. “Spare me.”
Olokun, still contained by the borders of the door, shook with silent and majestic laughter. A couple of glowing fish swam on either side of his head, illuminating his face. Cowrie shells were nesting in his hair. Barnacles in psychedelic colors grasped his chin, buried in thickets of hair.
Spare you, Olokun replied in the voice of gods, why should I spare you when you have been looking for me ever since you came here?
“What are you talking about?”
Images, like precious jewels in a velvet-lined box, were placed in Jed’s mind: the incense-soaked, shadow-shrouded cathedrals and churches he visited on the island; the self-conscious prayers to the Black Madonnas, the multiracial and androgynous Christs; the visits to the grotto of Saint Sebastian, and the fountain where he leaned languorously, in an ecstasy of arrows; the half formed prayers before he entered into bars where male beauty was of paramount importance. All clandestine prayers to remove the raised blemish on his face.
Olokun chuckled. Bubbles of power escaped from sculpted lips. Those gods did not listen. I listen.
Jed’s heart leapt. “You—can help me?” His keloid burned.
A barely perceptible nod of the massive head. Olokun’s voice boomed in Jed’s skull: Why you want to remove that proud flesh from your face? You are marked. You have a map of Guinea on your face. You should be happy.
“Please,” said Jed.
You must give me something.
What could he possibly give this being of lava and scales, of iridescence and shells? Could he give his soul—a kind of Faustian bargain? As Jed considered what the god might want, he was interrupted.
I will take this thing, Olokun’s voice broadcast across his brain with satellite precision.
“What? Wait—”
A wave engulfed his thoughts and swallowed them in a sea of obsidian and lapis lazuli water, ground down by molars of coral, turned into particles of silt. They drifted down to the belly of the man leviathan. Images hissed away, in ghost of steam. Blond-haired Adonises, with muscles of alabaster, neither regions of coral. Blue eyes burned in the liquid furnace of Olokun’s belly, as did aquiline noses and thin lips. Brown haired Jesus, tonsured men of the one God and the whores and virgins went down the ethereal intestines, to become more mulch for the bottom of the oceans. Jed was seared in flames of cold ice. He bounced in the phantom belly, and was rejected himself, of the anus of Olokun, along with the silt—
Yellow sands, and the bare feet of black people—his people—were the first things he saw. He heard the screech of seabirds, the sigh of waves, and the low singing of a chorus of people. He rolled over on his back, and found the crystal blue sky encircled by a ring of singing, concerned faces. He was back on the beach. He was sort of cold—he coughed, and seawater was expelled from his lungs, further soaking his already sodden clothes. Absurdly, the group of people began to laugh and clap. Jed thought unkind thoughts as he crashed back down into sleep.
His second awakening was gentler. Someone had stripped the clothing from his body, and placed a blanket over him. A pillow was underneath his head. But he was still on the beach. He saw the sky streaked with cirrus. He was warm and relaxed. Jed stretched, and instinctively touched the side of his face, to check his keloid. He felt nothing.
He felt again, expecting the ugly, knotted network of raised skin. He felt smooth, uninterrupted flesh, soft as silk. He rubbed again. It was wondrous, tender, but it did not tingle. Jed pulled his covering away, and cautiously stood up. He was nude, but he didn’t care. The serpent sun under the sea was in his heart. He was whole again.
And the island loved him.
Circus-Boy Without a Safety Net
Lucifer came to him in drag. He was disguised as Lena Horne.
C.B. went to see The Wiz with his family. The movie was pretty cool, by his standards, even though he thought Diana Ross was a little too old to be playing Dorothy. But the sets were amazing—the recasting of the Emerald City as downtown Manhattan, the Wicked Witch’s sweatshop, the trashcan monsters in the subway. The songs sometimes lasted a little too long, but they were offset by Michael Jackson’s flashy spin-dancing. But it was the image of Lena Horne as Glinda the Good Witch that would follow him.
She appeared in the next to last scene in a silver dress. Her hair was captured in a net of stars, and she was surrounded by a constellation of babies, all wrapped in clouds, their adorable faces peering out like living chocolate kisses. He fell in love. Ms. Horne was undeniably beautiful, with her creamy, golden skin, and mellow, birdlike features. Her movements during the song “Home” were passionate. They were at odds with shimmering, ethereal-blur in which she was filmed. Indeed, she could not be of this earth. In all of his life in Willow Creek, NC, C.B. had not seen anything like this before.
He was in love, all right. He researched her in libraries, finding old issues of Ebony and Jet; he watched old movies that she’d appeared in, like Cabin in the Sky. He collected some of her records; his 8-track of “Stormy Weather” was so worn, he had to buy another copy.
But in the weeks afterwards, he began to sense that this love of his wasn’t quite right. His brother and his father would tease him about his “girlfriend,” who was 70 years old, and about how, when he came of an age to marry, she would be even older than that. Of how he could never have children. His brother was particularly mean: he imagined a wedding, held at Lena’s hospital bed, with her in an iron lung, exhaling an “I Do” as ominous as Darth Vader’s last breath. But C.B. wanted to explain that it wasn’t like that at all. He couldn’t quite put it into words.
Sea Swallow Me and Other Stories Page 11